If you cannot send emails to Gmail, your server may have been blacklisted. Here are some tips to get removed from the Gmail blacklist. Before jumping through the blacklist removal hoops, you may want to double check that your emails are not simply going into the spam folder. This process will not help you with emails being dropped into the spam folder. This is for getting off of Gmail’s blacklist. I am going to outline 3 steps. Verify you are on the Gmail blacklist. Perform preliminary blacklist removal checks. Submit Gmail blacklist delisting request. Gmail Blacklist Verification If you are blacklisted, then you should be getting a delivery rejection notice from Google. If you check your server’s logs or your email bounce you may see something like this: Remote_host_said:_550-5.7.1 Our_system_has_detected_an_unusual_rate_of unsolicited_mail_originating_from_your_IP_address._To_protect_our users_from_spam,_mail_sent_from_your_IP_address_has_been_blocked. Please_visit_http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html_to_review_our_Bulk_Email_Senders_Guidelines If you are seeing this email error, then your server’s IP has likely been blocked by Google. There could be other response codes, but typically all Gmail blacklist notifications will include a 550 error plus a link to the Gmail policies pages. If you are not seeing 550 errors, then you may not have an email blacklist problem but some other email delivery issue. Preliminary Blacklist Removal Tasks Before requesting removal from Gmail’s blacklist, you will want to take some steps to stop whatever caused the listing. See some of my other blacklist post with Google for more details but in a nutshell you should: Make sure there is no unauthorized email going from your server. Check the daily volume of email going to Gmail Look for compromised user accounts. Look for people forwarding email to Gmail. Once you...

Recently a client asked us about a problem they were having with email that was being run on the same server that we had setup their website on. In this case the problem was pretty severe as they had been blacklisted from sending emails to any Gmail.com email address. After contacting the hosting company we were able to identify that one of their email accounts had been compromised and was being used to send out SPAM emails. It was an unfortunate situation that could have been avoided. In this post we cover what blacklisting means, what to do, and how to avoid it from happening again. What does ‘blacklisted for email’ mean? Blacklist definition According to google.com a blacklist is ‘a list of people or products viewed with suspicion or disapproval.’ In regards to email to be blacklisted means a provider such as Google has determined that your domain is abusing its system by sending too many emails to addresses on its network. Once you have been added to a blacklist all emails you attempt to send to the provider will be denied and you will see a message similar to this one: SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: host aspmx.l.google.com [74.125.142.27]: 550-5.7.1 [YOUR IP ADDRESS HERE 1] Our system has detected an unusual rate of 550-5.7.1 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our 550-5.7.1 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been blocked. 550-5.7.1 Please visit http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review 550 5.7.1 our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. ck6si8779257igc.40 - gsmtp How did you get blacklisted for email? You will...

I have seen this one too many times with friends, families organizations over and over again. It’s happened to me in the past before, having a portable drive storing all my important document, photos and a whole heap of other files and thinking it would never happen to me. Then one day it crashes. I received a call today from a frantic friend who had just lost a chuck of important business emails for the last 6 months. Why? because they had gotten a new laptop and using Microsoft Outlook kept all their emails stored locally on their laptop, so while trying to export from the old and import to the new an option “overwrite existing data” was accidentally left ticked while they were mindlessly talking on the phone. Investigated for what was 3 hours using various methods in an attempt to restore the lost emails, it eventually came to a point where he had to cut his losses and accept that 6 months of his business emails were… gone. I told him this as i tell you now it is important to probably devise a plan on how you can backup your data so that in the event of losing your storage device, floods, theft you will still have access to your data. DO NOT keep your family photos, important documents, assignments in a USB or portable hard drive. The best method to always keep a backup and a method that i use are one of 2 ways. 1. Use a cloud based backup service 2. invest in a NAS (Network Attached Storage) My samsung galaxy S3 automatically...